VI A MIDSUMMER KNIGHT’S DREAM: The Cowboy

I

Into the monotonous beat of a heavy rain on the tin roof and the rhythmic snoring of a dozen men the alarm clock on the window sill of the bunk house burst with a wild, metallic scream, announcing four o’clock of a wet morning. Low groans here and there, the stretching of tired bodies and a break in the snoring of the cook—temporarily housed there—followed.

Dice Barnett, the corral boss, sat up in bed and yawned. Then, “Roll out, boys!” he roared, and yawned again.

The cook sat up and stared venomously across the row of inert figures.

“You bellow like a bull!” he growled.

The corral boss said nothing. At these rising hours he was always hopeless and dispirited. The cook thumped his pillow, lay back and was instantly asleep again. Only the wranglers rose at four. The Kid, in the next bed to Dice, opened a pair of drowsy eyes in a sunburned face, and shut them again. But Dice, with the gesture of an expert, leaned over and dragged the coverings away, making a clean sweep of them. The Kid made a frantic clutch, but they were gone. The cold early-morning air of the mountains penetrated to the Kid’s very marrow. Grumbling, he got out of bed.

In the faint light other equally hopeless figures were emerging. No one spoke. Life wasn’t worth the effort. They pulled on their trousers, shirts and socks, and began the daily struggle to get into boots still damp and stiff from the day before, and always, even at their driest and best, a trifle small. The bunk house resounded with dreary thuds as their heels came down, thud, thud, on the floor.

“Get out and lemme sleep,” muttered the cook, with his eyes shut.

Outside on the rough veranda the men morosely got their chaps and gloves, and the Kid lighted a lantern and led the way toward the stables, where the night horses waited for the morning wrangling. The silent line, dogged, unhappy, still half asleep, plodded through the mud and rain without speech, except for a muttered comment from some one to the effect that this was the life.

The Kid was as silent as the rest, but, for a reason of his own, less hopeless. And once outside the barn, boots softening a little under mud and rain, blood moving a little faster, the stalls warm with the heat of a dozen animals, signs of life began to assert themselves among the others. Gathered around the lantern they tossed for who should wrangle the cañon and who should take the big pasture. They saddled under shelter, and leading their horses out mounted them carefully, for the horses in the small hours of the morning were rather like themselves, irritable and quarrelsome. The Kid, with an eye toward the cottages, still shrouded in darkness, moved with extreme deliberation.

Dice slid into his saddle after the manner of one experienced in the early-morning tempers of horses, and rolled a cigarette.

“One thing this rain’s good for,” he observed. “No dude woman will want to wrangle in it.”

From one or two quarters came a half-hearted assent in this. Now and then some Eastern girl among the ranch boarders who had proved herself to the corral, with its rather exacting standards, was given the privilege of rising at four a. m., lighting herself to the corral with an electric flash, getting out her own saddle and bridle, and then of accompanying the men on their wild ride through the dawn, risking her neck for the thrill of being a part of the romantic world of story and dream. Always, to outward seeming, the attitude of the men was one of amused tolerance. Actually they accepted it as tribute, took extremely good care of their devotees and concealed behind their taciturnity certain predilections which they would have died rather than avow.

“You tell ’em,” said Al, the saddle boss.

The Kid said nothing. He cast another glance toward the sleeping cottages, and led his horse back and forth several times before mounting.

Dice watched these manœuvres coldly.

“Don’t let me hurry you any,” he said politely. “Maybe you’d like your breakfast first.”

Reluctantly the Kid mounted, but before he touched spur to his horse he looked back. Yes, quite certainly; unmistakably. There was a spot of white light moving through the semidarkness toward the corral. The Kid suddenly dismounted, and throwing up a stirrup began to fumble with a strap. But the corral boss interfered cruelly.

“Come right along,” he said. “Whoever she is, she’s out of luck.”

The Kid was forced to mount, and they started, going at a walk in order to get the stiffness out of their horses, climbing slowly up the steep and muddy trail which they could not see, but which the horses followed unerringly.

At the top Dice slowed up and the Kid fell in beside him.

“Who was the wild woman?” he asked.

“It was the Carter girl,” said the Kid, with an assumption of indifference. “Rosamond Carter.”

“I thought so. She works while the other girls sleep.”

“What do you mean by that?” the Kid demanded truculently.

“Just what I said, son.” The corral boss’s voice was bland but firm. “She makes a life work of what ought to be a little diversion, and she’s that afraid of getting out of practice that she keeps her hand in on you—and me,” he added as a cautious afterthought. On and up they rode. From far away in the big pasture rose to them already the shrill cries and whistles of Al, Slim and Jack Moncrielle as they hazed the horses into bunches and threw them together, a hundred or so, ready to run them back along the trail to the corral and the day’s work. The stream in the cañon below roared with its burden of the night’s rain, which streamed down the steep walls in a thousand temporary torrents and drowned all conversation. The Kid rode on, turning over in his mind the corral boss’s comment. Now and then he thought of replies he might have made, but hadn’t.

Once, indeed, he did clear his throat and commenced, “You don’t understand her. She—”

But the rushing water drowned the sound of his voice.

The horses, seeking shelter, had wandered far up the cañon and off the trail. With the first light the men began to bunch them, their own animals climbing like goats, finding foothold here, there and anywhere. Once the Kid’s horse slipped and went down, and there was a bad moment when eternity lay over a rock and a foot away. But there came a good moment, too, when the last straggler had been brought in, when the rain had ceased and the tops of the cliffs were pink with the rising sun, and when through the cañon and out on the plain below, the Kid could see the ranch, and smoke rising from the cook-house chimney.

The Kid felt his first glow of the day, and it was compounded of the facts that the morning wrangling was over, that breakfast was waiting, and that somewhere in that huddle of pin-point houses Rosamond Carter was living, moving and having her being. He drew a long breath.

“I want to talk to you, Dice,” he said, as they rode companionably behind their morning’s salvage. “This is the life, all right. But where do you go from here?”

“Meaning?”

“There’s no future in this sort of thing, Dice.”

“No? I thought you were going to take up a homestead.”

“There’s nothing in ranching,” said the Kid gloomily. “Look at the Old Man. Had to come to dude ranching after all. And if he couldn’t make it go, who could?”

Dice said nothing. Somebody had been getting at the boy, he knew, and he knew who it was. It was the Kid himself who gave him his chance a moment later.

“I think you’ve got a wrong idea about Rosamond Carter, Dice,” he offered.

“Maybe—maybe not.”

“What’s the matter with her?”

“I told you. She works while the other girls sleep, that’s all. Do you think she piled out of bed to go wrangling in the rain because she loved Nature? Rats!”

“Even at that,” the Kid said hotly, “I don’t like the way you speak of her.”

“No? I didn’t suppose you would. Well, you’ve asked my opinion and I’ll give it to you. She’s the sort that has to have some fellow trailing after her or she isn’t happy, and if she can pry him away from another girl it doesn’t take anything from her pleasure.”

“There was nothing between me and Janet, Dice.”

“All right. I’ll take your word for it. But did Janet know it?”

The Kid was very angry—unreasonably angry. He had merely tried to set Dice right as to Rosamond Carter, and Dice had had to drag in Janet, and a lot of extraneous matters which the Kid himself was trying very hard to put out of his mind. “You’ll feel better when you’ve had your breakfast,” he said witheringly.

In the cook-house ham and eggs, flapjacks, fried potatoes, coffee, corn bread. The Kid ate enormously but sulkily, and then, lounging out, took a quick survey of the ranch. Already in the corral Jack Moncrielle’s rope was whirling and the horses were milling madly. As he brought out each animal, meek enough now that the rope was around its neck, the saddlers took it in hand and fastened on it the badges of servitude. A growing row of saddled animals stood waiting.

In that brief glance the Kid could see all that constituted his little world, with its hopes and problems. The Old Man, an affectionate but rather misleading term, the Old Man being fifty; on the porch in front of the linen house Janet in a blue gingham, fresh and tidy and steady-eyed, but with a despondent droop to her mouth; and coming toward him, gay and smart in riding clothes and showing no resentment for the morning’s fiasco, Rosamond Carter.

“I’m awfully sorry, Kid,” she said. “I got there just a minute too late.”

“Oh, that’s all right,” he said awkwardly.

“I just went back and cried, Kid.”

He was practically stricken dumb at this confession of emotion, and the hand which held his after-breakfast cigarette trembled. Nothing adequate to say occurred to him, but his wildly rolling eyes saw that Janet had risen and was going into the linen house.

“ ’Stoo bad,” he muttered.

Rosamond had caught his glance toward the linen house.

“Well, I’ll try again to-morrow,” she said brightly, and moved a foot or two away. Then she turned. “You certainly are a handsome thing, standing there in the sun!” She smiled at him. “I wish I had a picture of you.”

She went on, and the Kid drew himself up to his full height and put a hand carelessly to his neckerchief. Then he took off his hat, recreasing it, rolling up the rim at the sides with tender hands, and replaced it, slightly tilted, over the right eye. After that he swaggered up to the corral.

II

Now Janet was in the ranch, but hardly of it. Her mother was the ranch housekeeper; but years ago, in the days of the open range and hostile Indians, when the Old Man was young and believed that the proper place for dudes was east of the Mississippi River, she had been the great lady of the cow country. Her husband had been a younger son of the British aristocracy, a fact which he had proceeded to forget as quickly as possible, except that he had gone through his money like an English gentleman, both living and giving generously.

Not that that mattered now, save for a certain breeding, an English sort of reticence and the excellent horsemanship which were all he had bequeathed to Janet. His widow was the ranch housekeeper, and during the long summer she went around from cottage to tent, tent to cottage, conversing with maids in some such manner as “Get some mouse traps for 22, Maggie. The field mice have eaten Mrs. Brown’s orange sweater.” Or “Tell Mr. Jenkins in 18 that he’ll have to stop smoking in bed. He burns holes in his sheets every time.”

Janet taught school in the winter, riding back and forth on Midge, the little buckskin which she had trained to an uncanny degree of intelligence. Not that Janet had any idea of the importance Midge was to assume in her life, but because, until the Kid came into it, she had a good bit of leisure time. After that, of course—

The Kid had come over from the Powder River country some eight months before, a big brown boy with a scar on his neck from the Argonne Forest, a good saddle, a dauntless spirit and ten dollars in coin of the realm, which he stood ready to bet at any odds or none on anything at all. He lost the ten dollars and his heart almost simultaneously and for the rest went through his initiation into the outfit creditably.

He was given bad horses and stuck to them as long as his knees held out; fought with his two fists when he had to; jibed and was jibed at; mortgaged his pay in advance on blackjack and poker; drank a variety of moonshine under different names, with equally disastrous results; and in sentimental moments was wont to tilt back his chair, draw his hat over his eyes and, having thus secured the delusion of isolation from his kind, to produce a mouth organ and pour out his soul in a succession of dismal sounds.

He had eight words of army French, a cowpuncher’s sense of humour, a very masculine vanity, an extreme humility about women, and a modesty so shrinking that he did without bed sheets for a week because he wouldn’t ask Janet for them.

“What do you get out of all those books, Miss Janet?” he had asked her once.

“I like to know about things. Don’t you?”

He set about a course of reading then. It irked him horribly, but it was his idea of decreasing the distance between them. He would sit off, grimly aloof from the card table, going at full blast, and feel that with every line, so to speak, he climbed a step. By late spring, although nothing had been said, Janet and the Kid were keeping steady company, and the Old Man had his eye on a homestead for them up Indian Creek. But the summer influx had changed everything. Beginning with the first of June the ranch took on a strange and exotic blooming, became colourful and sparkling. The lawn by the big house began to be dotted with bright hats and sweaters. The corral lost its air of businesslike austerity and on its high fence perched strange and brilliant birds, with clear young voices which shouted, “Ride ’er, cowboy!”

The wranglers themselves took on some of this new colouring. They began to appear in new hats, in pink shirts, in vivid-coloured neck handkerchiefs. The corral in business hours, which were all day now, was as full of local colour as a Buffalo Bill show, and slightly reminiscent of it, for the Old Man knew his business.

And to the Kid a new and bewildering world of women opened up, and with this difference: He had always looked up to Janet as a sort of superior being, and now came dozens of girls, clean and sweet and wholesome as the mountain air, who stood near him, in groups or singly, and gazed at him as at some supreme and magnificent creature.

They tendered him the homage of all the romance they had built up about the West, gazing at him with their clear soft eyes, seeing in him the Virginian or some other hero; but mostly Faversham.

It went to the Kid’s head. He paid thirty dollars for a new pair of inlaid spurs, and was quite apt, when not otherwise occupied, to play idly with a hemp rope, with which he could do a variety of things. When, standing like a star in the centre of a circle of satellites, he let it settle gently over the head of some pretty creature, she would flush at the distinction. Generally, that is. For once he saw a new girl, Rosamond Carter, and roped her neatly. But Rosamond did not flush. She looked quite squarely into the Kid’s eyes and said, “Now you’ve got me, what do you intend to do with me?”

It was the Kid who flushed that time.

The cruel thing about it all was that Rosamond very deliberately set to work to steal the Kid, to sacrifice him to make a summer holiday. Before she fixed on him she had coolly appraised the masculine situation, the men of the outfit, the visiting Easterners, even the Old Man himself. She even knew about Janet, which must be Janet’s excuse, for she will need one—and Janet knew that she knew.

Perhaps Rosamond maliciously hoped for a struggle, girl against girl; but Janet never put up a fight. She let the Kid go his blundering, masculine way, cried herself to sleep at night, rode Midge and trained him in a sort of desperation, and presented to the Kid and to the world a sort of frozen friendliness that wrung the Old Man’s heart. The Kid was gone. He rode with Rosamond in the evenings, and swallowed whole her bait of his horsemanship and his red-bloodedness and the general lack of both in Eastern men.

“There’s nothing to the society game,” she would say, sitting on her horse and looking over the far places through lashes lightly touched with black paste. “I’m a better woman when I’m here with you.”

The Kid felt rather noble at such times, and very, very strong. Now and then, however, his conscience hurt him, and he would go and sit on Janet’s small veranda. But he could not find anything much to say, and Janet would not help him. She never once told him that he was a magnificent specimen of manhood, although she felt that the mould had been broken when the Kid was made. She did tell him that he needed a haircut, and Rosamond rather gasped when he appeared later with a dark roof on the ridgepole of his head, so to speak, and from there to the eaves and below almost entirely unthatched.

On cottage verandas the great burglary was much under discussion, and sympathy was entirely with Janet. Even the Kid came in for his share.

“The poor fish!” was one gentleman’s comment. “She’s got him out of water and gasping, and when he’s good and dead she’ll throw him back.”

Certainly the Kid was gasping. He was not sleeping well, and in the long night watches he lay and thought to the accompaniment of a chorus of snores in which the cook sang the bass. Even the Kid knew that Rosamond would be expensive, and that red-blooded manhood was hardly a sufficient asset in supporting a wife; and somehow he could not see Rosamond on a one-hundred-and-sixty-acre homestead, in a log house, washing dishes. He was divided between going East to make a fortune and prospecting the mountains for a gold mine. On the whole he leaned toward the gold mine. It was quicker, and certainly there were traces of gold in the creek.

He took a camping trip up into the mountains, and on his return the boss had a bad time with one of the campers.

“The next time I go out, for God’s sake send me with a guide. That boy we had was hunting gold instead of firewood half the time.”

“Gold!” said the Old Man thoughtfully.

Now the Old Man was no fool, and he was fond of his boys. Especially he was fond of the Kid. So that evening, cigarette in hand, he wandered up to the corral. Generally during the dude season he stayed away from the corral, for out of every hundred intelligent and considerate riders there was sure to be one congenital idiot who thought it highly Western to take a horse stiff with hours of standing and spur him into a wild gallop at the start.

The Old Man, at such times, according to the corral, was likely to go off by himself and tell God all about it, and later to tell the horse killer himself.

So he wandered up, cigarette between his teeth and battered hat on his head, and stood off by himself, watching; and, since he was no fool, he got the Carter situation in a minute. He saw her standing watching the Kid, and the Kid saddling with the highest sort of efficiency, but conscious of her every second. And when she had got her horse at last he saw her go down the road and stop there waiting while the Kid roped out his own animal and threw the saddle on his back. The Old Man smiled and called to the Kid.

“Going somewhere?” he inquired.

“I’m through, sir. I’ve been teaching Miss Carter to ride, and I thought—”

“Ride!” snorted the Old Man. “That girl rode in a horse show before you were out of short pants, son. What’s she been putting over on you?”

The Kid gulped and said nothing.

“Now see here!” said the Old Man. “You’re new to this dude stuff, and it’s gone to your head. All the boys get it at first, but it’s like being vaccinated. They’re safe after that, and the scar hardly shows.” He surveyed the Kid, who looked like the picture on a coloured jacket of a Western novel, and grinned. “It’s the trimmings, boy, the trimmings!” Then his smile died and his face hardened. “But I’ll tell you this: If this local colour is going to turn one of my best men into a damn fool, then by the Almighty I’ll put the outfit in overalls. I don’t see any women going crazy over the blacksmith or the irrigator.”

He started off, but turned and spoke over his shoulder.

“Put your horse up,” he said. “One of the principles of this ranch is to teach its guests self-confidence. Maybe she can manage alone—if she has to. And another thing: There isn’t any gold in these mountains. I’ve prospected them for forty years.”

It was that night that the Kid proposed to Rosamond Carter. There was a dance going on, with the band from the town forty miles away. The band arrogated to itself certain prerogatives, in addition to a fair amount in money. Thus, once each evening, after looking over the ground, the gentleman at the bass drum would pick out the best dancer, signal to her with a lifted finger and thus indicate, no matter what her previous engagement, that the next dance was his. And once also each evening the cornetist would, instrument to mouth and blowing lustily, cut in and send some discomfited youth to the wall.

The bass drummer chose Rosamond that night, and she shot a glance of visible triumph around the room. It was when it was over that the Kid took her outside and asked her to marry him. He was so husky that she had to ask him to repeat it.

“I don’t mean now, Rosamond. All I want is to know that you care. After that—” He made a large gesture, implying no doubt that if she cared the rest was easy.

“Of course I care, Kid dear. I’m crazy about you.”

He nearly broke her hand, so convulsively did he grab it.

“But—marriage!” Rosamond said gently, loosening her hand and surreptitiously rubbing her fingers. “That’s different, isn’t it?”

“Why different? If you love me and I love you—”

“ ‘Marry’ is such a long, long word,” she said. “Let’s not worry about that part of it. There’s no hurry about it. Let’s just be happy together.”

That suited him well enough. He was too content to force things, and he knew extremely well that there could be no hurry about it, anyhow. Of course he kissed her, and he was trembling all over when he released her. Quite certainly he considered that the kiss had sealed her to him, that she was his and he was hers. He didn’t go back to the dance at all. He wandered out and half dazedly climbed a butte, where he sat in the starlight, not thinking so much as feeling, while tired horses grazed around him and the lights of the ranch below were a constellation of planets, reflected in an ink-black lake.

But—and here was a queer thing—Janet suddenly came into his mind, and his first thought was that now he had lost her! He had never heard that a man may have a passion for one woman while he loves another, and certainly it did not occur to him then.

One of the stars below was Janet’s, and he sat and gazed at it for some time. Then—such a strange creature is man—he went down from the butte and stood watching the dance from outside a window, just to catch a glimpse of Rosamond.

III

In August came the ranch rodeo. The bad string was brought in a day or two before for the bucking contests, and a long-horned Mexican steer waited in a paddock to be bulldogged. Half a dozen burros for roping and tying were there, too, and in the bunk house at night there was a strong odor of saddle soap and metal polish.

Two days before the rodeo came a mysterious gentleman with long grey hair parted in the middle and brushed out in tufts over his ears, and wearing a grey-checked suit of exceeding loudness, bound with black braid.

The corral, viewing this apparition from a distance, pretended to be immediately stricken with blindness, and reeled and staggered about. And, accustomed to the ways of dudes, they waited breathlessly to see the new arrival in riding clothes.

But he did not ride. He sat on a bench most of the time, rolling cigarettes with a facility that put even the corral to shame. Once he wandered up, took a look at the horses and wandered away without a word or a change of expression.

“I wouldn’t sit in a game of cards with that guy, not for a million dollars,” said Jack Moncrielle. “I bet he doesn’t open his mouth to eat, any more than he has to.”

The Kid saw the newcomer, as he saw everything at that time, through a sort of haze. Even the talk that drifted to him in the bunk house, that Poker Face was a cruiser looking for talent for a tent show on the water front in Chicago, passed over his head. He had washed a pan of sand from the creek and found a fleck or two of gold in it, and already at night, when he pulled his mouth organ out from under his pillow and poured out his soul, he was riding in his own automobile, with Rosamond beside him. He never dreamed that the man in the checked suit was to cost him one good year of misery.

The rodeo came, and with it half the countryside. It parked its cars in great lines and brought the children and luncheon boxes, and when the riders rode into the field, to the blare of the band, it crowded to the fences and cheered. It cheered them all, but mostly it cheered Janet. Janet and the Old Man led the procession. Janet was going to ride!

When the Kid learned it, before the procession started, he had a queer sick feeling. Just for a moment he forgot Rosamond, and he made a furious protest to Janet herself.

“I think you’ve lost your mind,” he said.

“Why?”

“It’s all right for us. We’re paid to risk our necks to amuse the dudes. But you! You’re not!”

“Don’t worry about me,” said Janet coldly. “And if you want to know it, I’m not riding to amuse the guests.”

His rage increased when he saw Janet drawing for her horse like the others, but when she drew Corkscrew a dull despair settled on him. Even the Old Man was anxious then, but he need not have worried. Corkscrew lived up to his name, leaped and twisted, whirled and lunged, but Janet’s knees hugged him like two slim steel vises, and Corkscrew came to rest at last, beaten.

When Janet looked around the roaring, cheering field all she saw was Rosamond, delicately clad, cool and very feminine, watching her with hard, triumphant eyes.

The rodeo went the way of all rodeos. Al was thrown and knocked out. He lay quite still, a suddenly pinched and colourless profile turned up to the sky, in the midst of breathless silence. Then he moved and the crowd relaxed. He got up and limped off.

The Kid rode and bulldogged with the others, neither better nor worse than the average, which was good. And he swaggered a bit, with the thirty-dollar spurs clanking and the nail heads on his chaps gleaming like silver. When he caught Rosamond’s eye she smiled, and the warm sense of a secret intimacy between his own perspiring self and her cool exquisiteness swelled his heart almost to bursting.

But Janet, after all, provided the hit of the day. For she brought out Midge after the riding was over, when the bull had been retired to rest his weary neck muscles, and all the little burros, after the thrill of their lives, had trotted docilely back to tell their families of their escapes. And Midge performed.

It is not necessary to tell what Midge did. His fame is a part of the vaudeville history by now, and Janet’s, too, for that matter. Actually Midge was only an agency for the working out of those certain destinies with which this story deals. At the time he provided Janet with the means of release from an intolerable situation, for by nightfall the ranch knew that the cruiser, which is only a bunk-houseism for a highly honourable profession, had made Janet an offer for vaudeville and that she had accepted it.

The bunk house was divided in its opinion that night, but the Kid did not hear about it until later. He spent the evening sitting on the creek bank with Rosamond, telling her about the gold.

August wore on, with the Old Man teaching Janet fancy rope work behind the barn, with divers sluggish Eastern livers renewing their youth, with the horses a trifle leaner and their riders browner, and with the Kid out on the bank and gasping, and Rosamond not yet ready to throw him back.

With the end of August came the general exodus from the ranch. Apparently new people, who were really the old ones changed by their city garb, began to appear on the lawn. The truck carried daily mountains of trunks to the railroad. The line of horses at the rail at saddling time diminished day by day. The grass in the pastures and on the high meadows turned in patches to red and brown. The prairie dogs in Dog Town could emerge without the whistle of a bullet past their heads. A deer was seen in the cañon, and a guide brought in a small and highly disagreeable black bear cub. In a word, the early fall of the mountains was at the door.

And Rosamond was going. The Kid would waken in the morning before the alarm clock and lie there wondering how he could bear it. He thought of her exquisiteness, her fastidious daintiness. He saw her going back to surroundings like herself—although he had not the faintest possible idea of what such surroundings might be—and the bunk house suddenly seemed horrible to him; the boots on the floor, the snorings of the men, the cook’s false teeth in a cup on the chair beside the bed, Dice, in his underdrawers, his fine body bare and uncovered to the waist.

He had a wonderful parting from Rosamond. They rode up the cañon and watched the moon rise, and she made him promise a dozen ways to be faithful. She made no promises herself, however, and he was to remember that later. When late that night he went to the bunk house he found Dice waiting for him, sitting on the step.

“Well,” was Dice’s greeting, “thank God, that’s over!”

“What’s over?”

“Rosamond. You thick-headed idiot, d’you think you’ll ever see her again?”

“That’s my affair,” said the Kid loftily.

“Not by a damned sight!” was Dice’s comment. “This outfit has been short one man for eight weeks, and you’re the man. Now you take some advice. Can the Lady Rosamond and crawl on your face to Janet—and I hope to God she puts her foot on you.”

Janet did almost literally that.

By the middle of September the ranch was almost down to what Jack Moncrielle designated as a prewar basis. A dozen horses saddled in the morning, six or eight in the evening; in the bunk house long sessions of poker or blackjack, in the peculiar silence of the gambling puncher; Janet training her horse; the Old Man shooting ducks out on the flat, and in close conclave with Janet in the evening; the alarm clock in the bunk house set at six instead of four; in the pastures cinch sores and saddle galls slowly healing, and spurs a cruel memory, and in the Kid’s mind already a faint haze over Rosamond’s memory and an unexpected pang at the knowledge that Janet was going away.

Then two things happened in quick succession which showed the Kid what he had done. The first was that Janet was caught in the wire.

Now to be caught in the wire is one of the desperate emergencies and often one of the tragedies of Western life. Horses caught in the wire come home with flesh torn to ribbons, deep cuts to the bone, muscles and tendons severed.

Fortunately it was not Midge, but another horse. Janet knew better than to lay a fence flat and try to leap over it, but she was possessed those days by a sort of restless desperation, and it followed the first talk she had had with the Kid for weeks. He had gone to her, humble enough in all conscience, unable to bear the thought that she should leave with the coldness between them. Janet was in the little paddock the Old Man had given her, with Midge’s curious stage properties scattered about, for she had just finished a lesson, and she heard him through without a quiver.

“In all you’re saying,” she said at last, “you are taking for granted that you have offended me or hurt me. Just why?”

He fingered the hat in his hand nervously.

“Well, we used to be good friends, Janet.”

“Aren’t we still?”

“You didn’t tell me you were going to do this thing.”

“I didn’t tell Dice, either, or any of the boys.”

“That’s different.”

“How is it different?”

“I don’t know. I used to think it was.”

He gave it up then and went away. He didn’t understand it himself, so how could he explain? All he knew was that it mattered less and less each day that no letter came from Rosamond, and more and more that Janet would soon be gone. He went away and sat by himself, staring in the general direction of the railroad, which seemed somehow to be interfering with his life. And Janet saddled the Old Man’s bay mare and got caught in the wire.

When the mare’s foot caught and she leaped forward she pulled the wire Janet was standing on and threw her on it. Instantly she was caught on a hundred red-hot, tearing and jerking points of agony. The mare leaped over her, leaped back again, reared and fell. The wire by that time was over and under Janet, and the horse was up again. Janet was dragged out into the field as post after post gave way, and then the mare got free.

The Old Man found Janet there a half hour later, her clothes torn to ribbons and stained with blood, and he got her out and onto his horse. She was too dazed to be questioned, but the Old Man knew, and he muttered most of the way home.

Her going was delayed almost a month by the accident, and in that month the Kid suffered horribly. Rosamond was like a bad dream by that time, but if he wanted to forget her the bunk house gave him no chance. He grew to hate her very name, although not as much as he hated himself.

He was consumed with jealousy too. It was Dice who sat with Mrs. Allenby and Janet during the convalescence, and Slim who took over the care and training of Midge. Even the cook, wandering over in the evening with a bit of specially broiled chicken or trout, had the entrée to the Allenby cottage. Only the Kid was left out.

The truth, of course, was that under the ice that had frozen over Janet’s love the current of it still ran fast and furious. But the ice was there. Even the Old Man finally put in a word for him, but Janet shook her head.

“If he would do it once he would do it again,” she said. “I used to mind, but I don’t now.”

The abominable fact that all the ranch had pitied her was, next to the Kid’s defection, what rankled. And when, the night before she left, the Kid came again, humbly, and stood before her she went quite pale with outraged pride.

“I’ve been a fool, Janet, and I know it.”

“About what?”

“You know what I mean, don’t you?”

She was not very strong, yet, and she began to tremble, but her voice was steady. She even laughed a little.

“I suppose I do. But aren’t we all foolish at times? I was myself, last spring, but I’ve got over it.”

As old as the hills, this story. The wandering male, the hurt pride of the woman, four feet of distance and yet a mile or so between them. The Kid, who had never heard of the vicious pendulum of love, from passion to hate and back to love again, the Kid turned on his high heels and went away from this new and different Janet, who was as hard and stiff and shiny as new leather.

It was entirely clear now that she had never cared a plugged nickel for him. He had thought once— They called this life, did they, this thing of working all day and suffering all night? Life!

He went down and sat by the creek. Life! A man poured out his whole heart at a woman’s feet, and she went on the stage and painted her face, and a lot of dudes stared at her and sent her notes and took her out to supper. Life!

Oh, well, let it ride!

IV

Janet started East the next week, with Midge in a box car and the Old Man himself going as far as Chicago. And—blow after blow—Slim was going along, to sleep with Midge and tend him on the train, and later on in chaps and spurs and full regalia to assist Janet during the performance. Slim!

Janet’s farewell to the ranch was rather emotional, but the Kid watched in vain for any indication that he was more than merely included in the general tout ensemble. The boys rode to the station and cheered her wildly as the train pulled out, the Old Man waved his hat, and something seemed to fall through the Kid’s diaphragm and settle like a cold flatiron below his breast bone, to remain there for a long, long time.

Years and years passed, and after a week’s time in Chicago the Old Man came home. There was nothing on the surface of things to indicate any radical changes at the ranch. The dogs greeted him uproariously. The lawn looked pleasantly empty and dudeless. The men were hearty and cheerful and ambidextrous at the table as usual. Nothing, in short, to indicate that only the outside of the Kid was among those present, and that, save of course for the cold flatiron, the rest of the Kid was unaccountably missing and might have been located in Chicago.

“How’d it go?” asked Dice Barnett, when the Old Man ambled over to the corral after supper.

“Pretty good,” said the Old Man. “Pretty good. That gold-toothed smile of Slim’s is going to be worth money to him now.”

He glanced at the Kid, but the Kid was sharpening his knife on the edge of a boot and seemed completely absorbed.

“As for Janet, she’s a hit,” said the Old Man, who hadn’t been talking to managers without picking up a phrase or two. “The act’s a knock-out. They’ve had the same sort of thing, of course; but with Janet’s youth and beauty—well, I wish you boys had been there. She sent her love to you all.”

The Kid tested the blade on a finger nail.

“She’s a right good-looking girl, Janet.” Thus, Joe, not without malice. “Somebody will try to pick her off the branch all right. I knew a girl once went on the stage, and she got a bushel of mash notes every week.”

The Kid put away his knife, rose and yawned ostentatiously.

“Reckon I’ll turn in,” he said, and disappeared from a circle which waited to grin until he had gone.

He slept very poorly that night, and spent most of his time reflecting bitterly on the trust in human nature which had turned Janet loose on the world without somebody near her to punch the face of any guy who tried to get fresh with her. A bushel of mash notes every week, eh? He lay there and saw Janet on a brilliantly lighted stage, while the theatre was entirely filled with gilded youths who—the Kid’s experience of theatres was small—almost buried her in flowers. He groaned and turned over on his face. Oh, well, what was it to him, anyhow? Let it ride, that’s all.

The winter came. Part of the outfit went down to the Old Man’s herd of steers in New Mexico, and Al and Joe were following cows in Arizona. The bunk house beds were empty, except for Dice and the Kid, and instead of blackjack and poker Dice read by the bunk-house lamp in the evenings, and the Kid played solitaire morosely. At mealtimes, for they were all together now, the Old Man read Janet’s letters aloud, and her clippings. Her advance man had got hold of her family history by that time, and played pretty heavily on it. The result was that she was being invited to good houses.

For instance:

“ ‘Everything on the table was gold,’ ” the Old Man read aloud one day. “ ‘Can you imagine it? But do you know something? I wouldn’t trade the whole service for the tin cup by the Big Spring.’ ”

“Rats!” said the savage fear inside the Kid. “Piffle! Tut! And as for that hundred and sixty acres and a log house, tut again. She’s gone. She’s lost. She’ll never come back.”

In November Dice Barnett and the Kid drove the horses along the old cattle trail by the creek to the winter range, and camped for a few days there. The Old Man had been hunting elk, and he blew into camp one day to find the Kid alone, sitting on his heel while he disconsolately fried potatoes in bacon fat, and whistling an extremely dolorous hymn. The Old Man sat back on a log and eyed him.

“Well,” he inquired, “got your sense of values yet?”

“What d’you mean?”

The Old Man looked around.

“It’s like this,” he said. “Take this creek, now. There’s gold in it—real gold. I don’t know from where, but it’s there. Fellows have frozen and starved to death looking for it. But there’s fool’s gold too. Every now and then somebody brings in some iron pyrites and thinks he’s made his everlasting fortune.”

“I get you,” said the Kid. “Well, I know the difference all right now, sir.”

That was all the Old Man said then. But later on, cleaning his rifle with a corner torn off the Kid’s dish towel, he said: “I got a Chicago paper a day or two ago. The Carter girl’s engaged to be married.”

The Kid said nothing for a moment. He was scraping the frying pan. Then he looked up and caught the Old Man’s eye.

“She was a right nice girl,” he said, and grinned.

Winter came on, and the ranch was isolated from the world. Once a week or so the postman in his flivver would work his way up through the roads, thaw out his radiator with boiling water and himself with hot coffee, and leave the mail. Bears came down from the mountains and left tracks around the storehouse and the kitchen. Deer came fearlessly to the feeding racks by the corral, and a mountain sheep was reported on Bishop’s Rock. On the day before Christmas came a great wooden box from Janet, with a fur coat for her mother and a set of Kipling for the Old Man, and on Christmas Day came a telegram:

Dearest Love and a Merry Christmas to all of you.

Janet.

No message to the Kid at all.

The Old Man was rather worried. The Kid had come to his senses, but there was still something wrong with Janet. And the Kid was on his mind. The boy was not eating and—the Old Man strongly suspected—not sleeping either.

“Maybe I’d better write her how things are,” he said one day to Dice Barnett.

“It’s no place for a third party, in my opinion,” Dice objected. “They’ll make the grade or they won’t, but they can’t be pushed.”

So in the long idle days of heavy snow the Old Man pasted Janet’s clippings in a scrapbook, and Mrs. Allenby mended and stacked linen, and the Kid slowly ate his heart out, having abundance of time for this sort of gastronomical misery.

The snow had come early and lay late, and in the open range along the foothills a dozen or so horses dead from cold and starvation had been eaten by coyotes, so that only their bones marked their tragedy. Out in the far meadows the cattle had exhausted the hay, and herculean efforts on the part of the men failed to open a road by which to send the hay carts through. In March they got out at last, and the Old Man breathed again. But the cold continued, and the feed grass was almost exhausted. On a dismal day in March the Kid rode out to the pasture with his revolver strapped on his hip, and cut out some twenty lean and sickly cows to die that the rest of the herd might live.

They looked at him with soft, appealing eyes; and the Kid’s hand shook as he drew the gun. When it was all over he went back and sat for a long time in the steaming barn, where the work horses munched their hay and no one was likely to find him. He would have sold himself for a ten-cent piece that day, and considered the price high.

But with the opening of the spring he found a bit of hope rising, like the sap in the cottonwood trees. Janet would come back that summer, and he would make up for all he had done. He worked solely to that end. He put a new roof on the saddle shed—for her. He dredged stone and repaired roads—for her. With the aid of six cow horns which he rubbed to a high polish and a piece of wood which he varnished, he made a hatrack, slightly odorous but very sightly in his eyes—for her. And in the evenings when his work was done he sat by the stove in the bunk house and played melancholy airs on his mouth organ, to the unprintable expostulations of the now augmented outfit.

The ranch was preparing for the summer influx. Painters and carpenters swarmed over the place; the boys came back from New Mexico and Arizona, jerked off their store clothes, pulled on their chaps, stamped into their boots and were off to report to the Old Man. An early dude or two came, and bunches of wild flowers began to appear in the dining room, while the cook began his summer-long complaint of having to clean the trout the men brought in.

And then at the end of June came Janet.

V

Afterwards, reviewing the situation, the Old Man blamed himself. He should never have let Rosamond come back to the ranch. Certainly he would never have let that fool Crosby Nugent get past his wire if he could have foreseen what was going to happen.

But who could have foretold that the Kid, for instance, was going to back out of the field without even giving battle? Or that Janet would take his withdrawal for indifference? The Old Man, who had forgotten the inverted psychology of lovers, wanted to shake them both, and nearly smoked himself to death over them.

Janet arrived first. From the inside of the car she had made certain that the Kid was with the others on the platform, and was thus able to adopt a wide smile which included everybody and singled out none. All winter she had hated herself for refusing the Kid’s overtures, and all winter she had waited for him to renew them. But he had not. Janet’s attitude, then, was a sort of feverish, watchful waiting; which was, unfortunately, also the Kid’s.

So she smiled at everybody, and the men cheered, and Slim stood in the door of his box car and hi-oo-ed loudly and repeatedly. And the Kid saw only a beautiful and expensively dressed young woman who might pretend to be the same old Janet, but who couldn’t put anything over on him.

No, the Kid saw it all quite clearly. He had gone back to Janet, but she had not come back to him. What was kissing the Old Man and shaking hands all around was a prosperous, successful and worldly Janet, a—he used the only word he had to cover the situation—dude Janet.

She couldn’t put anything over on him. Not even when she suddenly stopped talking and stood still, staring at the mountains with a queer soft look in her eyes. The Kid remained a little aloof, whistling to himself to show his complete comprehension, and his indifference to it. After a while he went over and talked to Slim.

There was no card game in the bunk house that night. In the centre of an enthralled circle sat Slim, and his talk was of Janet and the act. Strange theatrical terms fell from his lips, and stranger statements. Such, for instance, as an offer of ten thousand dollars for Midge, who had cost the Old Man forty, and that Janet’s buckskin stage outfit had set her back five hundred iron men; that the act drew down four hundred a week; that there was a line of Johnnies waiting for Janet every night that reached to the curb and out into the street.

“What about Janet? Did she fall for them?” inquired Dice, with a side glance at the Kid.

“Janet! She told me to push in the face of any one who spoke to her, and you bet I did it.”

The vision of Slim, fighting a path out of the theatre every night for Janet, held the bunk house silent for a moment.

“She’s a great kid,” said Slim reflectively. “A great kid.” While the men slept that night the Kid got up, and drawing on his breeches and boots with extreme caution removed from the wall the almost complete cow-horn masterpiece. With equal caution he reached the open air and headed for the creek.

July came, and with it came dudes and yet more dudes. The ranch overflowed with dudes. Pleasant, genial dudes, who did not expect metropolitan-hotel service and rode their horses carefully; disagreeable dudes, who were afraid to bully the Old Man, but tried it out on the corral with unpleasant results; fool dudes, who sat up all night to make night hideous and rode their horses to death or near it; men dudes, who immediately bought neckerchiefs and wide hats, and rubbed themselves into blisters trying to sit the trot; fat-women dudes in breeches riding off weight; pretty-girl dudes, who looked up at the ranchmen with soft romantic eyes, asking but for notice and a little condescension from the young gods in chaps and spurs.

Once again the alarm clock on the bunk-house window sill exploded at four a. m., and once again an occasional favoured girl was invited to crawl out of her warm bed before dawn, to risk her neck in the romantic West. But there was this difference, that the Kid now rose hopelessly to what may be called a womanless day. The Kid was definitely and permanently off women.

Rosamond blew in breezily the first of August, with a chaperon and Crosby Nugent, and inside of four hours the bunk house had classified Nugent as yellow. He swaggered up to the corral as soon as he had changed into riding clothes, and looked over the stock sourly.

“D’you call them horses?” he demanded of the Kid.

“If you’ve got any better name you’re welcome to use it.”

Mr. Nugent approached the bars of the fence and peered through.

“Suppose I can pick my own horse, eh?”

The Kid looked around. There was no one near.

“Well,” he said softly, “we usually make our own selections, but we aim to please. Which will you have?”

Some ten minutes later Mr. Nugent threw a leg over the back of the blue roan of his selection, and in so doing lightly touched the blue roan on the back with his spur. Immediately following this Mr. Nugent struck the barn wall with a thud, and then dropped to the ground, where he lay for a moment before the Kid helped him up.

“Must have scratched him somewhere,” said the Kid gently.

“Scratched him! I’m scratched all right. Why the hell don’t you break your horses?”

“Break them!” The Kid’s tone was pained. “Why, the children ride that horse. He’s a pet, he is.” He looked off at the blue roan, standing quietly by the rail. “Al,” he called, “look around for something quiet. See if Lizzie’s out.”

After that the men of the outfit were as definitely off Nugent as the Kid was off women. He rode a succession of horses, bringing them in scratched and sweating, and finding fault with them all. But the bunk house knew more than that. It perceived quite early that Rosamond was fatuously in love with him. She trailed him as assiduously as she had once trailed the Kid, but what had thrilled the Kid to his very soul was quite clearly beginning to bore Nugent. He took to riding early now and then to get off by himself, and it was on one of those early trips that he fell in with Janet.

It is hard to defend Janet. It is necessary to remember that she considered the Kid entirely lost to her, and to keep in mind Rosamond’s part in that loss, and of course, too, there was that rankling open humiliation of the year before. But the real issue was the Kid.

She had made one real effort to bridge the gap between them, but it had failed. She had asked him to ride with her some evening when his work was done.

“You don’t want to ride with me,” he said gruffly.

“I’ve asked you.”

“What’s the matter with the dude men who are always hanging round you?”

She flushed.

“I got enough of that last winter, Kid.”

Suddenly all the furious jealousy of that desperately lonely winter flamed in him.

“So I’ve heard,” he said coldly. She waited rather wistfully, but for a moment or two he busied himself with a saddle. Then, “Now look here, Janet!” he burst out angrily, “I don’t want you to be kind to me. I know you mean well, but—I don’t want it.”

She had had to turn and go away.

It was after that that Nugent met Janet on the trail one morning, and recognised her as the girl he had seen in a theatre the winter before. Maybe he considered the women of the stage fair game. Maybe he was bored with Rosamond. Maybe behind it all there was some genuine sentiment. Whatever it may have been, it is certain that from that day he spent an undue amount of time with her.

The Kid, glancing toward Janet’s cottage, could see him curled up on the step, animated and laughing, and Janet laughing too. When there came into view the crowd of young people, which followed Janet those days like the tail of a comet, Nugent would wander away, scowling, to look up Rosamond and make his peace with her. The Kid, who had begun by merely disliking him, began to hate him with a terrible hatred.

Just how Rosamond felt no one could know. She went about with a sort of frozen smile on her face, and made at least one effort to rouse Nugent’s jealousy by getting the Kid back. But the Kid knew nothing of such subterfuges, and he had no intention of going back.

She asked him one night if she might wrangle with him the next morning, and he uncomfortably agreed. Maybe she misunderstood the reason for the moody silence in which he worked in the dawn, his taciturnity on the homeward ride. But she was as desperate as he was, and less resigned. She swayed toward him in the saddle.

“Kid,” she said softly, “I’ve treated you very badly, haven’t I?”

“How?”

“Don’t you want to talk about it?”

He faced her squarely and honestly.

“I don’t see much use in it. Do you?”

“I want you to forgive me, Kid.”

“Forgive you for me having a brain storm? Well, I guess not!” Then he smiled boyishly. “I’m not holding any hard feelings,” he said. “I guess I liked being crazy while it lasted.”

That effectually closed any further negotiations so far as Rosamond was concerned.

The Kid was becoming an extremely difficult person to live with. He no longer joined in the card game in the bunk house at night, and if he wore his hat with the rim curled at the sides and the front tilted toward his right eye it was from pure habit. The swagger had gone from his walk and the lilt from his voice. When sent after strays he went alone, by choice, riding as though all the devils of hell were after him.

And Janet? Janet was suffering from a complex, which is a bad thing at any time, but which when constituted of love and hurt pride makes an insoluble compound with some of the attributes of revenge. She could not sit on her heel behind the saddle shed and whistle melancholy dirges. She could not yell at any crowd playing poker around the lamps to “For God’s sake put the light out and let a fellow sleep.” All she could do was to give hurt for hurt, and this she did with a Janetlike thoroughness.

After two weeks or so, when Crosby Nugent haunted Janet’s every step, and Rosamond’s eyes had a feverish glitter and her laugh was shrill and forced, one night Dice Barnett took his hat in his hand and presented himself at the Old Man’s office door.

“Come in,” said the Old Man from the lamplight by his desk. “I’ve been expecting you for a day or two.”

“Yes, sir,” said Dice. “I guess you were right last winter. They’re not making the grade after all. I don’t know but somebody’d better do some shoving.”

The Old Man nodded.

“Things are pretty bad, are they?”

“If he gets any worse to live with he’ll have to be roped and tied.”

The Old Man rolled a cigarette thoughtfully.

“I don’t know,” he said. “It strikes me, Dice, that this thing is between the two women now, and it is no place for us. I don’t know that I blame Janet, but I’ll tell you this: If she was half her age I’d give her a good spanking.”

He sighed and got up.

“It’s a good bit like a boil, Dice,” he went on. “It’s got to come to a head before it can be cut.”

Dice moved to the door. It was all right for the Old Man to be philosophical; he didn’t have to live with the Kid.

“He’s likely to do Nugent some harm some of these days,” he offered. “Looks to me like he’s just waiting his chance.”

The Old Man smiled grimly.

“The one rule of this ranch,” he said, “is first-class care of our guests. I insist on that.” Dice nodded and stepped out on the doorstep. “Of course,” the Old Man added, “what I don’t know won’t hurt me.”

Dice was smiling faintly as he went back to the bunk house.

The ranch meanwhile was watching the play with avid interest. It saw the foppish Nugent spending hours in Janet’s paddock in the heat and dust, hauling out and putting away props, holding horses, saddling and unsaddling, his face smeared with sweat and his clothing dirty and disarranged. Janet was training a new pony, and once it kicked him. He walked with a limp for days.

Just what he thought, what furtive and secret hope he had, cannot be known. Certainly he had no intimation of any situation save the Rosamond one, which must have been pretty acute sometimes. To him the Kid was merely a good-looking cowpuncher with a grouch, and certainly a small flare-up which occurred between them at that time must have puzzled him considerably. It came about, oddly enough, through the gold in the creek sand.

Certainly the Kid had never given a thought to any gold in the mountains after the Old Man’s statement relative to it. And so far as gold is concerned, if there ever was any there it is still there, for it has never been found. But although the Kid did not believe there was gold, if there was any—if this can be made clear—he meant to find it. And the breaking point came one day when Nugent came up to the bunk-house porch with a pan in his hand, with a few pin-point specks in it which he said were gold.

The Kid had watched him coming with malevolent eyes.

“Gold!” he said nastily. “Fool’s gold!”

“Real gold,” said Nugent.

“Fool’s gold!” said the Kid belligerently.

Nugent gave him a contemptuous glance.

“You may know how to ride,” he said coldly, “although I’d like to see you on an English saddle before I can say. But there may be one or two other little things you don’t know.”

The Kid got up slowly, with a dangerous smile, but Dice Barnett pushed him back and stepped in front of him.

“Better take it away, Mr. Nugent,” he said firmly. “There isn’t enough there to have any difference of opinion about.”

Over Dice’s shoulder Nugent got a look at the Kid’s face, and it must have startled him. There seemed to be no particular reason for the dull hatred that blazed in the Kid’s eyes. He was a trifle startled.

VI

So there were Rosamond and Janet and the Kid, all tragically unhappy, each in his own way; and Nugent, playing his game according to his own rules, one of which was that a revoke was not a revoke unless it was called, and walking through the collective disapproval of the ranch without recognising that it existed. The boil, in the Old Man’s language, was slowly coming to a head and causing considerable loss of sleep and general misery meanwhile.

Craps in daytime, cards at night occupied the outfit’s leisure.

Slim would stand, bones in his left hand, two fingers of his right extending upward, and beseech, “Allah be Allah, dice be dice!”

Al, squatted on the floor, would pronounce cryptically, “Read’m’n’weep,” which is translated into, “Read them and weep.”

Mrs. Allenby fought her eternal fight with field mice and pack rats. Early rising dudes in wrappers and slippers, clutching soap and towels, hurried to the bath houses to get what one cynical woman termed the first rim on the tub, and here and there some dashing gentleman wore a snake rattle in his hatband.

In a word, the season was well along. And then the boil came to a head. Janet was pretty sick of her own game by that time, and was not sleeping any better than the Kid; but she had, in effect, got a bear by the tail and couldn’t let go. Up to that time, too, Nugent had been skilful enough to keep their companionship on a purely friendly basis. It had not taken him long to find that the girl’s theatrical and worldly contacts had not touched her.

She had, however, definitely resolved to break the thing up. She was surfeited with revenge, and it was dust in her mouth, after all. She hated herself and she was close to hating Nugent. She started out that day, indeed, with the definite intention of making a complete confession and facing an unpleasant hour to save her own soul.

And it may be said for Crosby Nugent that he, too, realised that things could not go on as they were; that he stood ready, in that height of his infatuation, to break with Rosamond and to ask Janet to marry him. Like the Kid the year before, he was carried away by a new type of girl. His imagination was excited. And Janet was a blood-stirring little figure, with her apparently reckless horsemanship and that sort of cool defiance with which she now faced the world.

Any pretext answered with him for a ride with her, and this day he was going gold hunting. He had all the Easterner’s conviction that the mountains of the West were full of hidden wealth, which it required the higher intelligence of the East to discover, and they started for that final ride armed with pan and hammer, saddlebags and luncheon.

Just what happened cannot be known precisely. Apparently they lunched together in amity, and he took up his gold hunting again. They were about ten miles back in the mountains, and had sat down on the edge of a cliff to look over their specimens. The surmise must be that her closeness and their isolation went to his head, and that he commenced to make passionate love to her. All that is absolutely certain is that she undoubtedly pushed him over the edge!

He fell only about twenty feet, and landed on a ledge, but the shock made him furious, and he lost what remained of his temper when he found he could neither get up nor down. He must have said some bitter things then, for it appears that Janet must have sat for a couple of hours or so at the top of the cliff, refusing either to help him or to go and bring help.

Sometime in that two hours they both came to their senses. They were absurd, and they knew it. For him the romance of the West had died with the same thud with which he landed, and the nonsense had gone out of Janet when he disappeared over the cliff face.

The last hour of the two Janet spent in wondering how she was to get help to him without the Kid getting the story, and it is certain that Nugent’s chief thought was to keep Rosamond from knowing about his predicament. Janet had made him ridiculous before her, and his infatuation for her had smashed to pieces along with his pride.

It appears then that when the evening shadows began to fill the cañon below with purple, and the Bishop’s Rock high above was a massively rosy jewel set in gold, Janet went to the cliff edge and called down to him coldly that she was going for a rope; and that Nugent merely nodded, and went on grimly picking splinters out of his hands with the point of his scarfpin.

Janet was frantically determined by that time to effect the rescue herself, and to keep the story from spreading over the ranch. She rode slowly, to arrive as late as possible, and her plan was to reach unperceived the barn where Midge’s stage props were kept, to get her ropes and effect the rescue herself.

She would have succeeded, probably, but for one thing. The Kid was corral dog that night. Checking up at nine o’clock, he had found their two horses missing, and set himself doggedly to wait for them. Riders came in, unsaddled and turned their horses loose, to run on an easy lope to the pasture and the herd. The racks in the saddle house filled up, with the exception of two spaces, and filled with rage, despair and solid fear, the Kid stood with folded arms, staring at the mountains.

From the bunk-house windows came the sound of Slim’s voice, crying, “Hit me! Harder!” followed, not by the sound of blows, but of chips on a wooden table. Their hard day over, the wranglers were playing blackjack. Far away, in the Old Man’s office, shone the green shade of his office lamp as he pored over his accounts. The stable cat rubbed against the Kid’s ankles, caught against his spurs and spat angrily.

At ten o’clock he saw the wavering light of an electric flash coming toward the corral. It was Rosamond. She went first to the saddle house, and then came back to him, turning the light on him as she did so.

“They aren’t back, are they?” she asked.

“No.”

She collapsed on a bench and sat there, twisting her hands together.

“I don’t think they’re coming, Kid.”

“They’ll come, all right.”

“He’s wild about her. He doesn’t take any trouble to hide it.”

The Kid drew a long breath.

“Well, it takes two to make that kind of a bargain,” he said, and relapsed into sullen silence. After a time, however, he roused and said, “I’m going to leave here. Guess I’ll hit the trail for New Mexico—and herd sheep,” he added bitterly. He was, as a cow and horse man, committing himself to the lowest of degradations, but Rosamond had not even heard him.

“You know why it started, don’t you?”

“No, and I don’t care.”

“She’s paying me back for last summer, Kid. Oh, I know the ranch blames him, but any man’s a fool in the hands of any girl if she wants him to be. It was you.”

The Kid was dull with misery, and it was a moment or two before he grasped what she had said. But it brought him no cheer, even then. “I don’t care why she did it. You and I are just out of luck—that’s all.”

“Aren’t you going to put up a fight?”

“No, ma’am,” said the Kid. “If she wants him she can have him. And I wish her luck,” he added bitterly.

“Don’t be silly!” Rosamond snapped. “You and I have made a mess of things, and we’ve got to straighten them out—if we get the chance.” Suddenly she began to cry against the Kid’s shoulder.

“I’m awfully fond of him, Kid,” she wailed. “I’ve got my clothes and everything. And he’s fond of me too. It’s—it’s the altitude or something. When you’re not used to it it makes you different.”

“You tell ’em,” gloomily assented the Kid, and patted her shoulder. After a time he drew himself away and gave her a final brotherly pat.

“Now look here,” he said. “You go back to your cabin and crawl into bed, and I’ll get a horse and wander up the way they went. Chances are their horses got away and they’re walking in.”

Then suddenly he caught her arm.

“Listen!” he said.

A horse was coming in from the cañon trail. Under the cottonwoods a hundred yards away it stopped, and a moment later the Kid had caught Rosamond and pushed her into the shadow of the barn. Some one was coming from the cottonwoods on foot, a shadowy figure which proceeded to do a number of curious things.

First it went to one of the bunk-house windows and looked in. After that it struck a bee line for the barn, and the Kid put an arm across Rosamond’s chest and held her back against the wall. The figure entered the barn, groped there for a time very stealthily, and then emerged and started back toward the cottonwoods.

“Janet!” said the Kid sternly.

The figure started and dropped what it carried. The Kid picked it up and planted himself in front of the figure.

“Now,” he said, “perhaps you’ll explain what you want with a rope this hour of the night.”

“I’ll do nothing of the sort!”

“I’ve got the rope.”

“There are other ropes. I dare say that will occur to you in time.”

“Is anybody hurt?”

“No.”

“Where’s Nugent?”

“That’s my affair.”

“Not by a darned sight!” said the Kid furiously. “It’s my business too. I’ve sat back and let you two carry on your fool game about as long as I intend to, and I’m through. I’m going to go and kill him. Where is he?”

“I pushed him over a cliff, and he can’t get back.”

“Why did you push him over a cliff?” demanded the Kid, standing very tall and with his fists clenched.

“He tried to kiss me.”

Certainly Rosamond tasted the ashes of life at that moment. But certainly, too, the tight band which had been around something in the Kid’s left chest for some months gave with a snap, allowing his heart to race madly.

“Janet!” he said softly. “Janet, I—”

“Will you give me my rope, please?”

“What for? Let him stay where he is. He can die and rot there for all I care.”

But here Rosamond gave a little wail, and Janet saw her. She stiffened at once, and threw up her head.

“He’s in the Blue Cañon,” she said. “You and Miss Carter can go and find him.”

But when she started toward her cottage the Kid caught her by the arm.

“Not a bit of it!” he said more cheerfully than he had spoken for months. “You did this, and you’re going to see it through. If you don’t I’ll get the boys, and there’ll be a mouthful of talk going on around this place to-morrow. Think it over! There’s been a good little bit of talk already.”

“Oh, of course, if that’s a threat—”

“Sure it’s a threat, and I’m a bully! I’ve been so damned sick of sitting down and taking my medicine like a gentleman that I’m through being a gentleman, that’s all. How about it?”

Five minutes later a curious party of three rode out of the ranch toward the cañon and headed into the mountains. Of the three, one was softly whistling, one was angrily erect and silent, and one was dabbing at her eyes with a moist handkerchief. They followed the trail in darkness, knowing only of its climbs and steep descents by the inclination of their saddles, until at last they emerged into the upper meadows and starlight.

And there the Kid halted his horse and waited for Janet, to say, out of a clear sky and very virtuously: “There’s no excuse for a girl leading a man on, and then pushing him over a cliff because he tries to kiss her.”

“No,” she retorted. “I didn’t hear of any one going over a cliff last year.”

The Kid could think of no appropriate reply. He rode on, no longer whistling. But in spite of this rebuff his spirits were rising. It seemed quite clear to him that if a girl really loved a man she wouldn’t push him over a cliff. Therefore she didn’t love Nugent. Therefore it was distinctly possible that she might love somebody else. This feeling grew on him, and some time later he made a further overture:

“I made you a present last winter, but when you came back I threw it in the creek.”

“I can’t imagine why,” was Janet’s cold comment.

Thus repulsed, the Kid lapsed into an unhappy silence; but a little farther on he turned his head and spoke back over his shoulder: “It was only something I made out of cow horns. It wouldn’t appeal to you these days, anyhow.”

Janet made no comment, and thus thrown back on himself the Kid’s resentment against Nugent had time to take form and to develop into cold anger. By the time they had reached the place of that gentleman’s temporary incarceration all the bitterness of the summer, against Janet, Rosamond and himself, had crystallised into hatred of Crosby Nugent. That Janet remained cruel and aloof; that Rosamond clung to their heels; that even if she could have cared for him he had nothing to offer Janet but sixty dollars a month, a saddle and himself; that men had looked for the gold in the mountains for forty years and never found it; that he hadn’t eaten any supper—Nugent, when they reached him, was to bear the brunt not only of the thing he knew but of a dozen he had never heard of.

At the edge of the cliff, having tied their horses, the Kid borrowed Rosamond’s flashlight and bent over the edge. Some twenty feet below, sitting sulkily on a rock, below which again the cliff fell a sheer fifty feet, was Nugent. He looked up as the light appeared.

“Who’s there?” he called.

“Are you hurt?”

“Scratched. I can’t get up this infernal wall.”

“Well, there’s no hurry, anyhow,” said the Kid. “There are some of us here who don’t care if you never come back.”

“Go away and let me talk to somebody with sense,” Nugent shouted. “I don’t feel funny, if you do.”

“Sorry, old man,” said the Kid. “Only Miss Carter and Miss Allenby are here, and neither of them wants to talk to you. But you’re mistaken. I wasn’t being funny.”

For the first time it struck Nugent that the atmosphere above was, to put it mildly, hostile. He lost his head and his temper.

“All right. Be as serious as you damned please,” he called angrily, “but get me out. If you haven’t got a rope I’d advise getting one pretty fast.”

The Kid was beginning to enjoy himself.

“What’s the hurry?” he inquired.

Nugent’s position was distinctly inferior but he did the best he could. When he realised that no immediate rescue was being staged, braced against the boulder and facing up, he made an address to the jury above that for length, breadth and strength of language made the Kid hold his ears. When Nugent finally relapsed into breathless silence the Kid sat on the edge of the cliff and swung his legs over.

“Evidently the shock has set him to raving,” he observed. “The question is, is he worth saving, or shall I drop a rock on him?”

Nugent’s reply to that was a request to the Kid to go to perdition, an undiplomatic but excusable speech, which resulted in the Kid’s dropping his contemptuous attitude and reminding him sternly that there were ladies present.

“Now I’ll tell you how the situation lies,” he said in a conversational tone, his long legs dangling over the lip of the cañon. “You’ve been a nuisance on the ranch all summer. You’ve about ridden your horses to death, and that’s a ranch crime. And you’ve swanked about until we’ve had to grab a close hold on ourselves to keep you out of the horse trough. And you’re where you are because you don’t know any more about ladies than you do about horses, and that’s plenty.” The Kid paused, but Nugent remained sulkily silent.

“As the prisoner,” said the Kid, “you’ve got a right to plead.”

The prisoner immediately again consigned the Kid to perdition, and that gentleman smiled.

“I’ll reverse that sentence,” he said. Then he dropped his bantering manner and bent over the edge.

“It’s like this, Nugent. The ranch isn’t going to hold you and me after to-night. And I warn you that after the way you’ve talked I aim to put you in the horse trough before I go to bed. But you’re not getting out of there unless you agree to leave the ranch to-morrow, and that’s flat.”

“Rosamond!” bellowed Mr. Nugent.

“What is it?”

“Let that maniac talk his fool head off if he wants to, or roll rocks down here, as he threatens. You ride down to the ranch and send an outfit up here. I’m not going to stay here all night.”

The Kid was not only beginning to enjoy himself enormously but to grow a trifle drunk with power.

“Rosamond,” he said, “for the sake of our old love, stay where you are.”

There was a shocked silence from below, and then the Kid’s voice again as he bent over.

“Now, Mr. Nugent,” he said, “let’s be calm about this. I’m ready to make terms if you are. I’ve got a rope here, and I’ll snake you out of that place with no more trouble if you think you can make the noon train to-morrow.”

It was now himself that Mr. Nugent would see consigned to perdition before he made any such concession.

“Janet!” he called.

“Miss Janet,” corrected the Kid softly. “Anyhow, I wouldn’t bring her into this. She’s a trifle hasty at times. Put down that rock, Janet!” he called, and Janet, aloof and disapproving, drew herself angrily erect. The action sobered the Kid at once. He bent toward her and lowered his voice.

“Don’t be angry with me, honey,” he said. “I’ve suffered so darned much.”

In the darkness Janet moved closer to the Kid, and for the first time in months her voice to him was the voice of the old Janet, sweet and grave and very, very kind.

“So have I, Kid,” she said.

He caught her hand and kissed it.

Below, Mr. Nugent sat on his rock and considered the situation. He was cold and tired, he was angry, he was afraid to face Rosamond; but most of all he was puzzled.

“I don’t get it,” he said at last in a milder tone. “Where do you come in on this, anyhow?”

“Janet,” said the Kid, swiftly and in a whisper, “where do I come in on this, anyhow?”

“Tell him you’re engaged to me,” said Janet.

The Old Man had not been able to sleep that night, and so he got up and, rather sketchily clad, wandered about the place. The cottages were dark, the lawn deserted, but from the bunk-house windows came the glow of lamplight, and Slim’s plaintive cry, “Hit me again! Harder!”

The Old Man, smiling and clutching his dressing gown about him, stole past and went toward the corral. He went into the barn and moved among the night horses, speaking to them softly.

Suddenly, outside, he heard the sound of horses moving quietly, the rub of saddle leather, the faint clank of metal on metal. The Old Man listened, and then stepped back deeper into the shadows.

There were, he could see, several horses, and the business of unsaddling went on in a silence that was highly mysterious. One after another the freed horses made off for the pasture; one after the other their silent ex-riders carried away saddle, bridle and saddle blanket to the shed. Then, still without speech, the party seemed to divide, and two figures moved off into the darkness and two remained. The two which had gone were feminine, so far as the Old Man could determine in that place of breeched females. The two which remained were undeniably male.

“Now that the women are gone,” said one voice, “we’ll have this out, my friend.”

“Suits me,” said the Kid’s soft drawl. “And I’ve warned you, Mr. Nugent, what I aim to do. I’m going to wash some of your sins away in that horse trough.”

“Try it!”

“I intend to. It may cost me my job, for the Old Man’s orders are pretty strict. He says, ‘Keep your hands off the dudes. You might hurt ’em.’ ”

“Don’t worry about hurting me,” said Nugent. “I’ve stood a lot of insolence from you to-night, and before I leave here there’s going to be one sick cowboy.”

Very, very stealthily the Old Man moved toward the barn door, and there peered out. Nugent was taking off his coat and the Kid was kicking out of his chaps. When he was free of them he threw them aside and faced Nugent with a smile.

“Better take off your pants too,” he suggested. “The water might spoil ’em.”

Nugent’s answer was a furious rush.

The ranch slept. Out in the pastures which spread over the foothills, wire to wire a mile or two, the horses rested or grazed. A coyote barked from a high red butte. In a cottage down the road Rosamond lay, face down on her bed, and in her own little room Janet was standing before a warped and bleached bit of flotsam from the creek, a strange affair of dingy cow horns on a cracked wooden base, on which she smiled tenderly. And in the barn doorway stood the Old Man, snorting like a war horse with what might or might not have been anger, while before him went on a silent and mighty battle.

Inch by inch Nugent gave way. Inch by inch the Kid fought him back. The dust rose and circled about them. The stable cat brought a mouse and laid it at the Old Man’s feet, but he did not see it. The cat, waiting for approval, heard nothing but a low rumble in the Old Man’s throat, which sounded like but may not have been “Good Kid! Good boy!” And every inch of Nugent’s retirement led straight to the horse trough.

Some two minutes later the Kid, holding furiously to a writhing, splashing figure in the horse trough, felt a hand on his shoulder and looked around. One of his eyes was almost closed, but out of the other he saw trouble, and let go his hold to stand stiffly erect.

“You don’t need to drown a sheep, boy, to kill the vermin on him,” said the Old Man. Then, drawing his dressing gown around him, the Old Man went back to bed.

Some time later the Kid swaggered into the bunk house with the fillet of one of the cook’s best tenderloin steaks over an eye. In answer to tender inquiry he stated that he had bumped into a tree, after which he proceeded to undress and to crawl into bed.

The game went on. The Kid lay still, every inch a man and a good many inches aching. He was very happy, too happy to sleep. The noise went on about him, but he was alone in a great silence, with Janet.

After a time he reached under his pillow and got his mouth organ, and, lying there, softly and plaintively he made music to the song that was in his soul.